Few people have considered my thesis which is stated in the title above. Most assume the transgender movement is just a simple matter of protecting from discrimination a tiny demographic — .03 percent of the population who consider themselves transgender. Far from it. When you consider the enormous degree of state-sponsored censorship that is required by the movement — and the punishments meted out to people of conscience by each and every one of the laws its activists seek to pass — a far different story reveals itself.

Last week I spoke about all of this to an audience at the Family Research Council in Washington. You can watch the video by clicking on this link:

My goal was not to discuss the finer points of “gender identity” and what being transgender means for any particular individual. Instead, I focused on the broader and bigger picture of what the transgender ideology means for society at large. Transgenderism is an ideology that is based on the presumption that all human beings have something called a “gender identity that may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Notice how the word “assigned” is used to hide the reality that your biological sex is based in physical reality. This premise is written into every gender identity non-discrimination law. It basically aims to legally erase male and female sex distinctions. It applies universally — to each and every one of us.

The implications are vast — for our language, for our relationships, for preserving a free society. There can be no question that all of the gender identity anti-discrimination laws amount to little more than censorship laws, intended to modify everybody’s behavior and everybody’s language on pain of punishment.

So, in short, the transgender movement is operating as a vehicle for conformity of thought. And in the end, that means it is a vehicle for dismantling freedom – in the name of freedom – and for building the power of the State. In the end, it puts laws into place that abolish the right to free expression and suppress independent thought. The power of the state enters that vacuum, as it always does under such circumstances.

I’ve identified four features of the transgender movement that serve as indicators of its role as a vehicle for state centralization of power:

Transgenderism is such an extreme form of individualism that accommodating it in law will only create a vacuum for State power. By its very nature it demands that an individual’s inner sense of reality trump any commonly held understanding of reality. This makes it unsustainable. Its extreme individualism demands the breakdown of society’s mediating institutions – such as family, faith, and private associations — that serve as buffer zones that protect the individual from State meddling.

Transgenderism sows chaos into the language, requiring us all – universally and without exception – to accept a seismic change in the definition of what it means to be human, and what relationships mean, particularly family relationships. Freedom of speech and association are casualities.

It requires a very aggressive program of censorship in order to sustain itself and prop up its illusions over any commonly understood reality.

It depends on a very aggressive campaign of agitation and propaganda to condition people to get with the program.

It thereby sows the conditions for totalitarianism. We have no choice but to speak out in the face of its censorship. For more, see my talk at the link above. And let’s never forget that free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.